Inclusivity in education is one of the fundamental objectives of the Swedish national curriculum for compulsory schooling. The accessibility of STEM education to students of different genders is essential in achieving this objective. This paper studies the images Swedish and Finnish upper secondary schools used to promote their university preparatory educational orientations, applying discourse analysis to the body of images. As the discourses imbue the orientations, certain positions are enabled for pupils. These positions prescribe who and what is seen as natural in the orientations. We find substantial differences in how the discourses are represented in the orientations. In the STEM orientations, pupils are constructed as less social than the other orientations. In the images from the technology programme, female pupils have a higher representation than actual enrolment, but in these images, they are less active than their male peers. Moreover, the female technology pupil is positioned as engaged with more creative technology subfields while their male peers engage with electronic experiments. This positioning of the female technology pupil is rather conditioning her presence than creating an attractive educational trajectory for her to assume.

In this Research Full Paper we contribute to the research on constructions of technology education. Why are women and minority groups often under-represented in student cohorts in STEM programmes? Many studies have addressed this question, and much is known about the impact of representations of technology studies on the choices and motivations of these demographic groups in many countries. Many of the recent studies published in the English language address the North American education system. This paper investigates if perpetuation of gender norms might be evident in recruitment materials for Swedish upper secondary education. This research question is addressed through an analysis of how upper secondary education schools use images in presenting their university preparatory programs to prospective students. Swedish postcompulsory school education comprises a number of specialised upper secondary school programmes in Technology, Natural science, Social science and Economy. A significant display area of the web content regarding these programmes is pictorial information. In this study Technology Education is viewed as a societal construction and images representing the technology program are here used as a way of discovering both perceptions about them, and underlying themes that the choice of images might communicate. Three themes, Environment, Pedagogical approach and Human presence, emerge and serve as a foundation from which similarities and differences in the visual messages associated with these programs are investigated. Our major finding is that images used in association with Technology Education portray a paucity of social relations and a dominant culture of working/studying alone. These findings are of concern, as this type of profile has been shown to reduce motivation of women and minority groups to pursue such a career.